Shall we begin?
Robert Eggers
Writer-director Robert Eggers' "New England folk tale" isn't likely to become the pop culture phenomenon that The Blair Witch Project did, but it's an infinitely richer, more meticulous, more elegant, more unnerving and all-around better movie--the best horror since The Babadook.
That's the amazing thing about the horror genre: once you think you have it pinned, and you get tired of the obvious jump scares, the terrible acting, the crap production quality, and awful direction, along comes The Witch to destroy all your preconceptions and give hope that film can still make you feel real, undiluted dread.
If the story’s beats seem familiar at first read, Eggers presents them as new discoveries. The intensity of his writing and direction, as well as the eerie cinematography of Jarin Blaschke, Craig Lathrop’s grimy production design, and Mark Korven’s spine-tingling score, all combine to create a film of exceptional originality.
It’s creepy--beyond creepy, which is all we ask of our horror films--and its imagery will stay with you long after you’ve left the theater. The mood is so suffocating that it sometimes feels your watching the events unfold through your window--spying on the neighbors' arguments and intimate private moments.
For a first film, The Witch truly impresses, and it works because Robert Eggers does everything he can, not just to scare you, but to earn your genuine fear.
Mel Gibson
Thanks to some of the greatest battle scenes ever filmed, Mel Gibson once again shows his ever-impressive gifts as a director, able to juxtapose savagery with true, heartfelt tenderness. The best war film since The Hurt Locker, Hacksaw Ridge is violent, harrowing, heartbreaking and unforgettable.
Do not let the slow start fool you. Everything that happens in this film is specifically placed where it is for a reason. By the time the credits roll, you will come to understand that each scene is explicitly necessary and not a single frame of celluloid is superfluous.
Hacksaw Ridge is one of the best films of 2016, and not just because big-budget war films are great viewing experiences. This is a moving character study of one of America's greatest-yet-unsung heroes made by a supremely gifted director, and played by one of the best young talents Hollywood has to offer.
A review of Hacksaw would be incomplete without a discussion of its superb acting. Andrew Garfield is not only the best choice, he was the only choice. His portrayal of Desmond T. Doss is so subtle, and so reserved that he completely disappears into the film. People forget that Vince Vaughn used to play serious roles, but combine this with his dour appearance in True Detective and soon the days of campy cringe-comedies will be but a distant memory. And Sam Worthington! This movie makes him seem like a real actor, and that alone is worth some kind of award.
Martin Scorsese
Warning: if you can't sit for three hours, this film is not for you. Silence is a punishing, dark film that, despite its technical and visual grandeur, has a moral simplicity to it that should escape precisely no one. Monumental in its tone and mood, it proves once again that Scorsese is a master filmmaker.
Silence is a slowly unfolding, deeply thoughtful film about questioning yourself. About questioning authority. About taking stock of where you've failed as a human being, and wondering how you can make amends--to yourself, to others, and to God. Building implacable dread and tension from scene to scene, the story is as simple as its underlying ideas are endlessly complex.
Profound and illusory, Silence shows Martin Scorsese at the confessional, delivering perhaps his most intimate work to date. It’s a film full of tight close-ups of hands accepting gifts that comfort, inspire and bring support to their recipients’ souls. Perhaps that’s how we should receive it as well.
Scorsese has hit the rare heights of Ingmar Bergman, an artist who found in religion a battleground that often left the strongest in tatters, compromised and ruined. Desperately needed at a moment when bluster must yield to self-reflection, Silence is something to see whether you’re certain there’s a God or whether you just believe in sunlight, which covers just about everybody.
Ezra Edleman
ESPN's newest 30 for 30 film, O.J.: Made in America proves to not only be the equal of The People v. O.J. Simpson--and among the best things ESPN has aired in its history--but a perfect complement to the FX show. O.J.: Made in America is somehow even more engrossing than its fictionalized counterpart, meticulously fleshing out not only the details of the trial, but also the larger stories of race, celebrity, and misogyny that intersected around Simpson, making for the most compelling documentary of the year.
Provocative, intelligent, and thorough in it's research and depiction, Ezra Edleman's documentary tears along at an impressive clip given its length, with tragedy around every corner. Practically every moment of its seven-and-a-half-hour running time is thought-provoking, astonishing, sobering, hilarious, tragic, and sometimes all of those at once.
Superbly edited and paced, Made in America is one of the best rise-and-fall sagas you’ll ever see anywhere. A balanced, powerful, engaging, comprehensive perspective on the “trial of the century” and race, Edelman’s stunningly ambitious work is a masterpiece, a refined piece of investigative journalism that places the subject it illuminates into the broader context of the end of the 20th century.
Historically meticulous, thematically compelling and deeply human, O.J.: Made in America has the grandeur and authority of the best long-form nonfiction. If it were a book, it could sit on the shelf alongside Norman Mailer and the great biographical works of David McCullough.
David Mackenzie
Hell or High Water isn’t a flashy movie, but it has an undeniably resonant sense of small-scale justice, not to mention an authentic sense of place that will remind you of other Texas-set masterpieces like Lone Star and No Country for Old Men. By turns funny, elegiac, and thrilling, it’s a tale of brotherhood and family that takes in the harsh beauty of the land, the elusive nature of right and wrong and the quirky delights of human connections in a time of bewildering change.
With electrifying, graceful direction by David Mackenzie, Hell or High Water makes for a rich, darkly humorous and deeply insightful piece of crowd-pleasing entertainment, and with no fewer than four performances as good as anything we’ve seen onscreen this year. This is an instant classic modern-day Western, traveling down familiar roads but always, always with a fresh and original spin.
Furnished with faces as beaten as the vehicles the brothers drive and discard, Hell or High Water is essentially a chase movie; its humor is as dry as prairie dust and its morals are steadfastly gray. But this is the kind of Western in which we know there will be blood but pray there won’t be. The violence is bound to be gratuitous, and absurd, making Hell or High Water that rare humanist Western where finality is the true villain.
Hell or High Water is a thrillingly good movie--an explosion of drama, crime, fear, and brotherly love set in a sun-roasted, deceptively sleepy West Texas that feels completely exotic for being so authentic.
Shane Black
Ryan Gosling in a physical action-comedy? Whoever thought of the idea should be crowned genius of the year. With dynamite timing and uproarious gestures, he mines his diverse abilities and becomes a blast in The Nice Guys.
To sum it all up, The Nice Guys is basically Chinatown remade by Quentin Tarantino and starring foulmouthed, updated versions of Abbott and Costello, as played by two of the most recognizable male stars of our time. And it is the best of Shane Black’s films. It is eccentrically, sometimes broadly funny, with top-notch performances from Crowe and Gosling and a pitch-perfect sense of timing.
Half of the best gags in The Nice Guys are of the physical variety. Some of the action scenes escalate into full-on live-action Looney Tunes madness. An ultra-violent burlesque, the sort of cheerfully hostile buddy bash that’s been a staple since the ’80s, only this one is singularly clever about its own triviality, and it offers the scruffy pleasure of seeing two great actors dial down their gravitas with style.
Is this a family film? No way. Does it include scenes that some may find painful to watch? You bet. Will you be entertained? Thoroughly. It is an easy sit, a big fat slice of smart filmmaking that is constantly funny, startlingly violent, and oddly heartfelt. The Nice Guys is a grown-up delight, a perfect antidote to the nonstop barrage of effects spectacle that marked the summer movie season.
Think of The Nice Guys as candy-noir: all the key ingredients from mysteries like The Long Goodbye poured into a tall glass, then topped with an ironic parasol.
Denis Villeneuve
Although Arrival is about first contact with extraterrestrials, it says more about the human experience than the creatures from another world. This is a singularly powerful movie, without question one of 2016’s best. It's one of a handful of movies that have legitimately fooled us; not with an abrupt twist but a dawning awareness of where it's going thematically, how deeply and how distanced from sci-fi as usual.
Arrival is such a beautiful and thought-provoking film that it almost singlehandedly makes up for every bad aliens-coming-to-Earth film you’ve ever seen. Yes, even Independence Day: Resurgence. It is a beautifully polished puzzle box of a story whose emotional and cerebral heft should enable it to withstand nit-picky scrutiny; and like all the best sci-fi, it has something pertinent to say about today’s world: the importance of communication, and how we need to transcend cultural divides and misconceptions if we’re to survive as a species.
Kenneth Lonergan
Manchester by the Sea is a gracefully coarse ode to lives knocked down and if not bouncing back at least not splatting at rock bottom. There are also glimmers of humor shining all the brighter because of the darkness they cut through.
Every Manchester scene gives you a sense of the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, where it’s bitter cold but nobody makes too much of it, where the past stays with you whether you want it to or not. This is a movie that pays careful attention to details. The peerless actors match and elevate Lonergan’s artistry at every turn, and the film’s greatest gift of all may be that it declines to tidy up after itself--in the end, it’s the package that counts, not the wrapping.
This is pitch-perfect filmmaking, the kind that turns a hungry visionary into a popular last name, and every bit of it is earned. Manchester by the Sea is a hearty, rewarding drama we'll be remembering for years. A movie about unremitting grief that somehow has a boisterousness--a comic twirl--that makes it much truer to the zigzags of life than most similarly themed movies that simply pile on the gloom.
Damien Chazelle
Like a gift from the movie gods, here comes Damien Chazelle’s dreamy La La Land, right when a lot of us are in desperate need of some light. It’s a valentine to cinema, splashed with primary colors and velvety L.A. sunsets.
The musical, consistently daring and occasionally sublime, does what the movies have all but forgotten how to do: sweep us up into a dream of love that’s enhanced in an urgent present by the mythic power of Hollywood’s past. We were utterly absorbed by this movie’s simple storytelling verve and the terrific lead performances from Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, who are both excellent.
The real star, however, is the movie itself, which pulses and glows like a living thing in its own right, as if the MGM musicals of the Singin’ in the Rain era had a love child with more abstract confections, creating a new kind of knowing, self-aware genre that rewards the audience with all the indulgences they crave, while commenting on them from the sidelines.
La La Land is a film you simply never want to stop watching. It has wisdom and joy and sadness and magic, from the evocative power of music to the transportative power of movies. Here is a celebration of the artistic drive that is also a daring feat of showmanship, where it’s almost criminal to have to stay in your seat while the contact high of La La Land is goading you to dance in the aisle.
Barry Jenkins
Every year, we get only a few of these, movies that come out of nowhere, that are different, unexpected and wonderfully right. Moonlight is that kind of movie. In its quietly radical grace, it’s a cultural watershed--a work that dismantles all the ways our media view young black men and puts in their place a series of intimate truths. You walk out of Moonlight feeling dazed, more whole, and a little cleaner.
The reason it's distinctive has less to do with raw emotion, or a relentless assault on your tear ducts, and more to do with the film medium's secret weapons: restraint, quiet honesty, fluid imagery and an observant, uncompromised way of imagining one outsider's world so that it becomes our own. Directed with superb control and insight by Barry Jenkins, Moonlight achieves the near-impossible in film, which is to ground its story and characters in a specific place and time and simultaneously make them immediately relatable and universal.
Both a disarmingly, at times almost unbearably personal film, and an urgent social document, a hard look at American reality, and a poem written in light, music, and vivid human faces, Moonlight is magic. It's so intimate you feel like you're trespassing on its characters souls, so transcendent it's made visual and emotional poetry out of intensely painful experiences. It's a film that manages to be both achingly familiar and unlike anything we've seen before.
Barry Jenkins has made something astonishing: a film with immaculate craft that, at the same time, feels spontaneous, even tentative, as if it could panic that it’s revealed too much and close the curtains. He glimpses at the human soul and the hellish experiences endured despite it. We’re shown humankind’s capacity to change and the notion it’s never too late. Despite the somber tone, Moonlight is a beacon of hope for the prospects of speaking out.
